JM01 - Black Maps

by Peter Spiegelman

  “Nothing,” he said. She shrugged and looked at me.

  “More coffee, please.” She wandered off to get some. Pierro looked at his watch.

  “Sorry I don’t have a lot of time, John. I’m on my way to a lunch uptown.” I nodded.

  “I won’t keep you. I had a long talk with Al Burrows last week, and I got an earful about Gerard Nassouli. Maybe Helene mentioned it?” Pierro stared at a point around my left ear and nodded vaguely. “Burrows went into gruesome detail, but the long and short of his story was that Nassouli was the devil—not just a money launderer, but a corruptor and a blackmailer—and that you’d have to look hard to find someone he did a straight deal with.” Pierro fixed his eyes on mine. He snorted.

  “Is there a question there someplace—another version of are you a crook, maybe? I thought we’d settled this bullshit already.” His voice was hoarse and rumbling. Mr. Nice-Bear was fast disappearing into the woods. I held his gaze but didn’t speak. His big hands fiddled with the flatware.

  “I guess you need to hear it again,” he said. “Fine—my dealings with Gerry were legitimate. Okay? That do it for you? Can we get back to work on my problem now?” I looked at him some more.

  “What do you make of what Burrows had to say?” I asked. He snorted again.

  “How the hell should I know? How is it my place to make anything of it?” Pierro took a deep breath and forced a smile onto his face, but it was faint—a twitch away from a scowl. He sighed, and his shoulders sagged a little.

  “I guess it’s like what the government is saying about Gerry—I’ve got no reason to doubt it, but my dealings with him had nothing to do with any of that. So maybe Burrows is right—what the hell do I know?”

  “Any reason why he would make up this kind of stuff?” I asked. Pierro turned a fork over and over. He shrugged.

  “I barely knew the guy; I don’t know what he’d do or wouldn’t do,” he said. I nodded, then I tried out the five names I’d gotten from Burrows: Whelan, Bregman, Welch, Lenzi, and Trautmann. He looked at the tabletop and listened to the names and said no five times.

  Pierro checked his watch and looked up. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed again.

  “I’m being a prick, aren’t I?” he said. His voice was softer. “Sorry about that. I’m a little tired today. You get what you need here?”

  “I asked my questions—you gave your answers.” He made a sound that might have been a laugh.

  “And my wife—you get what you need from her, too?” The edge was back in his voice. I nodded. “Did you really have to talk to her about all that . . . crap? It’s ancient history, for chrissakes. How the hell does dredging that up help with anything?”

  “I’m not sure it does,” I said. “But I couldn’t know unless I asked, and I had to ask. I’m sorry if it was uncomfortable for her.”

  “It bothered her a lot less than it did me,” Pierro said. He shook his head. “I’m getting pissy again—sorry. It’s just that . . . Helene’s a good person, John . . . better than I deserve. She shouldn’t have to air her dirty laundry for no reason.”

  “It wasn’t for no reason, Rick. And as dirty laundry goes, I’ve heard a lot worse.” Pierro’s lips pursed.

  “So now what?” he asked. I explained my plans to find the five people Burrows had named. He nodded.

  “And if someone else has gotten a fax too, then we know something?” he asked.

  “Then we know something.” Pierro looked at his watch again, and I figured we were done. But we weren’t.

  “I didn’t realize you were Ned March’s brother,” he said. I looked at him. “I know him by reputation, and I heard him speak at a conference a couple of years back—your brother David, too. Smart guys, the both of them. And Klein’s a hell of a firm—one of the last of its kind.” He chuckled. “I did a little research of my own,” he said.

  “So I gather.” There was a trace of pleasure on Pierro’s face, at having taken me by surprise. And there was something more—curiosity.

  “Tell me if I’m out of line here, John, but I’ve got to ask—coming from a family like that, shouldn’t you be running part of Klein or something? How the hell did you end up in this line of work?”

  How did you end up in this line of work? Why do you do it? I’ve been asked those questions enough over the years that I should have some answers handy by now—but I don’t. Instead, I’ve got some vague crap that I mutter about aversion to desk jobs and not being cut out for banking. I trotted a little of that out for Pierro. He smiled and shook his head, incredulous.

  “Christ, if I’d had that kind of family juice when I was coming up, I’d have been CEO at French ten years ago.” He looked at his watch and rose. “Got to get to getting, John. It was good to see you. And thanks, again, for everything you’re doing,” he said. And he and his good-looking suit strode out the door. I headed downtown.

  “You’re not in here,” she said, and she stared deeply and with some consternation into the monitor that stood on her small metal desk. “If you’re not in here, you don’t have an appointment.” She was maybe twenty, and had a gold stud in her nose and another in her tongue, and was made up like she’d just escaped from the road company of Cats. She was tiptoeing her fingers gingerly across the keyboard, careful that no harm should come to her immaculate French manicure, in an excruciating attempt to locate me in Michael Lenzi’s appointment calendar. She wore one of those campy retro necklaces that had her name on it, rendered in gold-plated script. Brie. I stood a better chance with the cheese.

  “Why don’t I just rest here while you look,” I said. She ignored me and continued her glacial typing. I sat down. I watched water drip from my umbrella. I looked at the wet leaf stuck to my boot. I listened as, every minute or so, Brie tapped a key. If she had to answer the phone, too, I’d be here till Christmas.

  Arroyo Systems occupied part of a low floor in an anonymous building on Broadway, near Fulton Street. The reception area was windowless and small, furnished with a black leather chair, a matching love seat, a chrome and glass table, Brie’s command center, and a dead plant in a large plastic pot. The sheetrock walls were scuffed, and the carpet was worn and stained. A couple of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs were out, and the working ones buzzed annoyingly. Some dusty photos of canyons hung on one wall. There were a half-dozen old banking and software trade magazines on the glass table, along with last Friday’s Post and a few brochures about Arroyo Systems. These were filled with colorful but indecipherable diagrams, photos of smartly dressed people staring raptly at computer screens, and gobbledygook like “object-oriented n-tier message-based architecture.” It was impossible to tell from them what Arroyo Systems did. I started reading the Post.

  “You sure it was today—Tuesday?” Brie asked without looking up.

  “I set it up with Mr. Lenzi yesterday morning—for one o’clock today. Why don’t you just call him?” She looked at me like I was speaking Urdu, then turned back to the monitor. She was still delicately pressing keys and gazing uncomprehendingly at her screen when a wiry, intense-looking man opened the interior door and spoke to her.

  “I’m expecting a guy around one.” He paused and looked at me. “Maybe that’s you. You March?” I nodded. “Mike Lenzi.” He gave me a hard handshake. I followed him inside. Brie noticed none of this, and we left her pondering her screen, pristine nails poised above the keyboard.

  “How long she keep you out there?” he asked.

  “No more than a week,” I said. He snorted.

  “I don’t know where we get them from—Mars, maybe. And we can’t keep them longer than a month or two. We had one a while back— didn’t make it through lunch. Went out on her break and that was it, never saw her again. Took a laptop and a couple of wallets with her.”

  I followed Lenzi down a short hall, past a conference room and a kitchen, to a warren of cubicles with shoulder-high partitions. We picked our way through them and headed for a row of offices along the back wall. The cubi
cles were densely packed with computer hardware and wild tangles of cabling, and every surface was covered with a thick, unstable sediment of paper, technical manuals, CDs, takeout food containers, candy wrappers, soda cans, coffee cups, and other stuff too deeply buried or decomposed to identify. The space was cramped and chaotic and smelled like a dorm room, or an airport transit lounge after a week of canceled flights.

  I heard Russian being spoken, and another language that I didn’t recognize. Most of the people I saw were young and male. Nearly all of them were casually dressed, some in suit pants and dress shirts, some in jeans and T-shirts, and others in what could have been pajamas.

  Lenzi was the exception to the dress rule. He wore the pants to a navy suit, a blue-and-pink-striped shirt with cuff links, and a blue tie with a red geometric pattern. He was short, about five foot five, with dark, curly hair that had begun to gray and recede. His face was thin, and his dark eyes were deep-set. The skin beneath them looked soft and loose. He was clean-shaven, but the faint shadow on his jaw meant he had to work at it. I put his age at forty-five.

  His office was small and had too much stuff in it. The grimy window, with its view of an airshaft, only made things worse. He ushered me into one of the guest chairs and shut the door. He edged around me and slid behind his big, dark desk.

  “Lots of all-nighters?” I asked, gesturing out toward the cubicles.

  “Programmers,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em. They’re a fucking mess—excuse my French. If you were a client, I wouldn’t take you past the conference room.” Lenzi shifted restlessly in his seat. He picked up a paper clip and started playing with it.

  “What kind of software do you guys make?” I asked.

  “Trading systems. For FX, money markets, and derivatives. We do pricing, trade capture, position keeping, some risk. That probably doesn’t make any sense to you.” I shrugged.

  “How big a company is it?”

  “Small. We’ve been around almost two years, got sixty people or so, most of them out there,” he cocked his thumb toward the door. “Couple of sales guys in London. But we’re getting there.” His optimism sounded more habitual than sincere.

  “You’ve been here from the start?”

  “Not from the start, but soon after.”

  “You’re not a programmer, though,” I said.

  He snorted again. “Me? No, I do sales.” He’d unbent the clip and wound it into a spring shape. Now he straightened it again. His hands were large and pale, with black hair and blue veins on the backs. His movements were quick and a little twitchy, like he’d had too much coffee.

  “And before this—you were in banking?” I asked.

  Lenzi bristled. “Whoa, buddy, before we start in on my résumé, how about you filling me in on what the hell this is about?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Ever hear of Merchant’s Worldwide Bank?” Lenzi blanched, and paused in his torture of the paper clip.

  “I’ve heard of it,” he said.

  “Your name came up in some work that I’m doing that’s tangentially related to MWB—”

  Lenzi cut me off. “Came up how?” He was quite still now.

  “Only in the vaguest way. Just that you did some business with them a while back, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago.” Lenzi placed his palms flat on the desk. His face was immobile except for a small, pulsing vein high on his forehead. I went on. “That you dealt with a guy there named Gerard Nassouli.”

  It was like I’d spit in his face. Lenzi pushed back from the desk and gripped the arms of his chair. His hands were white, and the veins in them stood out like blue wires. The skin of his face seemed to contract around the muscle and bone underneath, and two red patches flared at his cheeks. His mouth was a taut furrow, and his whole body seemed to coil. I had at least seven inches on him, and probably fifty pounds, but the guy was ready to come across the desk at me.

  “Who are you, and what the fuck do you want?” The words came out in a dangerous hiss, like steam rushing from a valve. But he was fighting his rage, breathing deeply, flexing his fingers, trying to get the tiger back in the cage.

  “I’m looking for some answers,” I said evenly. “Nothing else. I just want to know if you knew Gerard Nassouli. And if anyone else has contacted you over the last few years about your dealings with him.” Lenzi stared at me in silence, his chest rising and falling sharply. I kept going. “I don’t care how you knew him, or what business you had with him. I don’t want to know. All I want to know is if you were threatened on account of it. Were you squeezed because you had dealt with him?”

  When he finally spoke, Lenzi’s voice was a choked whisper. “You get the fuck out of here. Get out now, and if you ever come near me again, I’ll fucking kill you—I swear it,” he said.

  This was not going well—death threats are always a sure sign. The rage that had overtaken him at the mention of Nassouli’s name had made Lenzi deaf to everything else I’d said or might say. And my sitting here wasn’t going to make it better. If I hung around any longer I was going to have to fight him or watch him have a stroke. I stood up and placed a card at the edge of his desk.

  “I don’t mean you any harm, Lenzi. If you decide you want to talk, give me a call.” I left him alone with his tiger.

  There was an espresso place around the corner from the Arroyo offices, and I went in and ordered a double and thought about Michael Lenzi. I was willing to bet I wasn’t the first person to bring up the unwelcome subject of Gerard Nassouli with him. The indirect confirmation was useful, but I needed more. I finished my coffee, walked over to Fulton Street, and caught the subway.

  Brooklyn Heights is at the western edge of the borough, across the East River from lower Manhattan and just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an affluent, almost suburban neighborhood, and has more in common with Scarsdale than with Bay Ridge or Bensonhurst. Its quiet, leafy streets, meticulously maintained townhouses, and postcard views of the city skyline, along with its proximity to downtown offices, lure plenty of Wall Street types across the bridge. It was a ten-minute ride from downtown Manhattan to the heart of the Heights.

  I took a slow elevator from the subway station to the street. It had stopped raining, but the sky was full of steely clouds and the wind was blowing in gusts off the river, shaking water from the bare trees. I walked down Clark Street a block and a half, to Willow Street. I took a left and walked nearly to the corner of Pierrepont. Lenzi’s building was on the west side of the street. It was a wide, four-story, Federal-style townhouse in brick, with white trim and black shutters on its high, narrow windows. It was set a little back from the sidewalk and separated from it by a black wrought iron fence and some boxwood shrubs. A short flight of brick steps led to the entrance portico and a glass and wrought iron door. I went in.

  I was in a small vestibule with a worn stone floor. In front of me was another glass door, this one locked. On the wall to my left was a video intercom and buttons for each apartment. Lenzi was in 4B. Through the inner door I saw a nicely decorated foyer with striped wallpaper, a small table, a couple of chairs, a bank of gleaming brass mailboxes, and an elevator. I pressed the intercom button for 4B.

  “Yes?” she said. Her voice was tinny and remote through the little speaker, but it was the young-sounding woman. Now she sounded young and anxious. I looked into the camera lens and gave my best trustworthy smile.

  “Mrs. Lenzi?” I said.

  “Who are you?” Suspicious now, and scared. My trustworthy smile needed work.

  “Mrs. Lenzi, my name is March. We spoke on the phone yesterday morning—”

  She cut me off. “Oh Jesus, I don’t believe it. I’ve got nothing to say to you. Nothing. You go away, or I’m calling the cops.” She was scared and angry, but more scared.

  “Mrs. Lenzi, please, I just want to talk to you—”

  She cut me off again. “I mean it.” She was getting shrill. “He said you might show up here. I thought he was being
nuts, but . . . Jesus. I’m telling you, get out now or I’m calling 911.” I heard a click from the speaker.

  “Mrs. Lenzi? Mrs. Lenzi?” Nothing.

  I went outside and stood on the steps. It was midafternoon, and the street was quiet. A few people came and went from houses up and down the block. A taxi rolled slowly by, dropped its fare at the corner of Pierrepont, and sped away. A few doors down, on my side of the street, a mailman brought his three-wheeled cart to a halt in front of a building much like Lenzi’s. He went inside. I walked down the steps, down the block to Pierrepont Street, and around the corner. I pulled out my phone and called Lenzi’s home number. I let it ring ten times. She wasn’t picking up. On the next corner there was a newspaper box with the Daily News inside. I dug out some change and bought a copy.

  I walked back to the corner of Willow to check on the mailman. He was working the building next door to Lenzi’s now. It took him ten minutes. Then he was back at his cart for a moment, and then he was climbing the steps to Lenzi’s building. I sprinted from the corner and went in behind him. I caught the inner door as it was closing. I walked through with my keys out, my umbrella hung on my arm, and my head buried in the sports page. The mailman turned to look at me.

  “How’s it going?” I asked, still in the paper. I pushed the elevator button. He grunted and kept looking at me. I turned to the funnies. The elevator came, and I got in and pressed 4. He was still looking at me as the door slid closed.

  The door opened again on a small hallway with striped wallpaper like the lobby’s. There were three apartments; 4B was opposite the elevator, its door a dark, shiny green with the apartment number in gold leaf, just above the peephole. I walked to the doors of the other apartments and listened. They were quiet. The whole building was quiet. I rang the doorbell. I heard footsteps from inside and someone at the peephole.

  “Oh god,” she gasped. “How did you get in here? Jesus . . . you broke in, you bastard. That’s it, that’s it, I’m calling 911, you son of a bitch.” She was very scared now, getting frantic.